HGST Now Shipping Ultrastar He12 12TB Hard Drive

It has been about 5 months since Western Digital introduced the HGST He12 12TB hard drive and now the company announced that it’s shipping these new impressive drives. The impressive capacity is achieved through an eight-disk design, increasing the capacity of the previous models by as much as 20%.

The HGST Ultrastar He12 is an enterprise drive and it comes with specifications to match. It is rated for workloads up to 550TB per year and has a target of 2.5 million hours Mean Time Before Failure. The helium-filled drive allows for 54% lower idle watts/TB than an 8TB air-filled drive, which is another bonus.

The Ultrastar He12 is available as SAS 12Gb/s and SATA 6Gb/s models, but there isn’t much difference besides the connection setup. The SAS model allows for more sector size options and consumes a little more power when compared to the SATA model.

Performance wise, the Ultrastar He12 is rated for a sustained transfer rate of up to 243MB/s reading and 255MB/s writing while the typical seek times are rated at 8ms reading and 8.6ms writing. Those are some impressive numbers for mechanical drives and when coupled with the available capacity, it’s pretty darn impressive.

The power consumption for the SATA model is 7.2W at typical operations and 5.3W when idle. The SAS model consumes a little more with 9.8W operating consumption and 6.1W when idle. That’s 0.44W and 0.51W per TB respectively. The noise level isn’t as important for an enterprise drive as it is for a consumer drive. The acoustics are rated at 2 Bels when idle and 3.6 Bels operating.

Key features include:

HelioSeal: Western Digital’s fourth generation, based on exclusive HelioSeal technology

World’s first 8-disk design: Delivering 12TB capacity using PMR technology in a standard 3.5-inch form factor